Marketing practitioners now understands that social media is key to content marketing since it is one of the best ways to amplify content. The two most important aspects of content marketing is publication and distribution with social media been recognized as the most effective method of expanding the reach and visibility of of published content.

2. Facebook ad pricing will increase significantly increase

The reach of Facebook posts have been decreased significantly in 2014, which is a serious problem for business owners who are using this platform for marketing purposes. This steady decline in reach is what has been coined the Filtered Feed Problem.

As Facebook continues to limit the number of posts page fans actually see, the demand for promoted posts and ads will continue to increase. This increase in demand will drive up the pricing. According to an Ad Week article earlier this year, 2014 Q1 Facebook ad pricing was up 10% over 2013 Q4 pricing. This trend is likely to continue into 2015 as organic post reach continues to fall.

3. There will sharp increase in users on Twitter’s new business advertising model.

Twitter is now offering businesses more choices and flexibility in how they create their ads and what they pay for. The new fee structure allows businesses to pay for certain performance-based actions rather than just retweets or clicks. Check out Twitter’s advertsing platform here.

These objective-based campaigns, which are still currently in beta, will offer more flexibility including tweet engagements (retweets, replies, etc.), website clicks or conversions, app installs, new followers and leads. These campaigns will be particularly appealing to small business owners who want to pay for results, not just for brand visibility.

The Google+ team has released new features such as Google+ polls and Google My Business.Google+ pollsallows you to poll other people on Google+ and learn what they think about a particular product, service or topic . Google My Business connects you directly with your customers, whether they’re looking for you on Search, Maps or Google+. Google My Business also puts your business info on Search, Maps and Google+ so that your customers can find you, no matter what device they’re using.

5. Instagram will become essential for image-based social media marketing

With over 200 million monthly users, Instagram is the network for image-based social media marketing. According to the Social Media Marketing Industry report, 42% of marketers are planning to increase their use of the platform this year, compared to 38% in 2013. Instagram will also continue to grow in the micro-video space. With both Vine and Instagram vying for billing as the top video networking site, the platforms have continued to differentiate themselves from the other offering different features, video lengths and editing capabilities. However, I believe we’ll see Instagram begin to outpace Vine as we enter 2015.

And with the recent emergence of Instagram’s in-feed video advertising, marketers will now have the option of paying to target their 15-second videos to users based on age, gender and country. While some have called the new video ads incongruous, the new feature is a welcome addition for marketers looking to promote their wares to Instagram’s young, affluent user base.

6. LinkedIn will widen the gap as “the” B2B social networkLinkedIn has been the top network of choice for the B2B crowd for years already, and I believe we’ll see the gap between LinkedIn and other networks continue to widen in 2015. According to the 2014 Social Media Examiner survey, 88% of B2B marketers are using LinkedIn, compared to 89% for Facebook and 86% for Twitter. I believe 2015 is the year LinkedIn will surpass Facebook for B2B marketing.

Conclusion

As 2015 progresses, it will be rather interesting to see how marketing professionals take advantage of these trends to build brand awareness, increase customer loyalty and drive sales. Do tell us what is working for you or share with our readers what other trends you have identified for 2015.

1.Work on your social media presence – Do you actively keep a Facebook, Twitter, and Google + account? If you do not, be sure to begin today. Invite your friends and business associates to follow your account, and make your profile, page or group something that will spread. Offer something for signing up and send it to them in a private message when they do. Make sure to regularly post amazing, useful content to the page or group so it benefits your followers. If you have the resources to take professional-quality photos or create inspiring visuals, consider using Pinterest as well. Effectively using social media can increase your company’s exposure exponentially.

2.Network in your industry – Many products can be very complimentary to other products or services. For example, if you provide peak performance coaching like Eileen Lichtenstein of Balance & Power, you could team up with Alissa Bickarof CompassRose Development to provide a series of powerful workshops as they did. Calling other businesses that sell your product and giving them a discount is a quick way to make steady income. Another idea would be to offer a special discount to a related business’s customers. Establishing relationships with related businesses could be very profitable in terms of both sales and exposure, depending on how you arrange the relationship and what your product or service is.

3. Clean up your website’s on-page SEO and add more content – With the recent Google Penguin updates, most sites are out of date with their on-page SEO. Make your site squeaky clean by fixing all 404’s,broken images, and other issues, and by adding lots of new, fresh, non-spammy content. The more original useful content you have on your site, the more value you add to the web and that means Google will value your site more. This technique helps convert visitors by making your website useful and valuable, and it can help you improve your search engine rankings to get more exposure and visitors.

Increased exposure leads to more customers and more revenues

4. Create lots of high-quality postings about your company on many different sites – The more content online linked to your website, the better. Make a quality lens on Squidoo.com about your product and include the product URL on it. Go to Wikipedia and make a history page about your company (being careful to only be informative and not pitchy at all) and include the URL to your home or About Us page. Other places you can create quality content with a link back to your site include HubPages.com, EzineArticles.com, ArticleDashboard.com, and Wizzley.com. With the recent Penguin updates in mind, remember to use a variety of anchor text links, including “click here” and the URL itself. This technique helps you spread your brand and products across lots of different websites, and can help you rank better in the search engines.

Remember, while these marketing techniques do not require any money to use them, they each require a certain investment of time. Some of these techniques are one-time-only, while others are ongoing.

Most of us make New Year’s resolutions, be it to work harder, to make more money, to give more to relationships, to lose weight and generally to be a better person.

So what will you do differently and better in social media in 2012? Will you listen before engaging or will you focus on just a few key networks? Having reflected on my 2011 efforts and saw where I could improve, I made some Social Media Resolutions that will solidify my position as an expert in Inbound Marketing.

To make social media an integral part of my overall communication strategy – social media is but one of the many ways to communicate. Sometimes face to face networking event is more effective than a Facebook message or a direct message on Twitter.

To listen more – Jumping in without understanding the conversation can make one look foolish and incompetent.

To be more relevant – Share more information that will be more beneficial to my online community. Use of demographics to figure out what my network want to know.

To be more engaging and responsive -Reading about what others do is great, however, taking the time to respond to something will benefit the writer and the community at large. Conversation connect people and enhance experiences.

To sell less.

To evaluate my efforts – Which social networks should I be really on? Use Google Analytics and bit.ly links to track my efforts.

To blog at least once per week on topics my clients, readers and critics want to read about.

So, there you have it, my top social media resolutions for 2012. Have you made any? Feel free to share them with us.

Also, we welcome questions on any aspect of Inbound Marketing, Email Marketing, Social Media Marketing or online branding.

Every astute business owner wants to determine the return on investment made in all aspects of their business, including Social Media and Social Networking. Here are five ways to determine ROI for these important marketing media.

1. Reach – This is the number of Twitter followers, Facebook fans, LinkedIn group members you have and is directly related to your social media success. The more people will see your content, the more people will spread your messages. Track how your reach is increasing over time. If you’re not attracting new followers as time goes on, focus more of your social media efforts on generating new fans and followers. You must build your reach to increase the value you get from social media marketing.

2. Traffic to website/blog – In social media marketing, one major goal you should have is to drive traffic from social networks to your website and/or blog. Look at your website/blog’s referral sources to determine how many visitors came from social media sites. For example, when you post a blog update use bitly.com to shorten the link to your blog since bitly.com will track number the of persons who click on the link and therefore traffic driven to your website.

3. Lead Generation– This is arguably one of the most important metrics to use when measuring social media marketing ROI. Take another look at the traffic you’re generating from social media sites. Of that traffic, how many of those website and blog visitors are converting into leads? Of course having a lead conversion form on your website to capture visitor contact information is extremely important in this process.

4. New Customers – Now take the lead data one step further. Are your social media leads actually turning into customers? And just how many of them are? Being able to attribute actual customers gained is perhaps the most powerful indicator that the time you spend on social media marketing is actually worth it.

5. Conversion Rate – What’s the visit-to-lead conversion rate of your social media traffic? In other words, of the social media traffic you’re generating, what percentage of those visitors become leads? While this may seem like a useless metric in itself, the conversion rate can be very useful when comparing one channel with another. For example, you can compare your Facebook conversion rate to your blogging conversion rate to analyze the ROI of those channels relative to each other.

Use ROI to determine your success on Social Media

Do share with us your how you determine the success of investing your resources in Social Media and Social Networking?

Recently there has been a dramatic shift in online searches, a Google shift. The king of search, Google, decides it’s time to include social engagement in its algorithm. Google now places a very high emphasis on social engagement when ranking web pages.

So, why the big shift? Well, it’s simple really. Google is in the business of providing accurate results. For quite some time now, different shades of search engine optimization, SEO, have cluttered the results by not-so-subtle manipulation. Way back you could garner a first page presence by stuffing keywords on a web page but now Google has made it tougher, so, SEO techniques has evolved and advanced to stay a step ahead. As a result, you could often find page-one results that didn’t really belong but were there because of clever SEO companies.

But Google is wise. Google will reward you if you have consistently evolving, uniquely engaging content that your followers respond to. Take the time to interact with your customers on the social various networks.

The lesson for you, the businessperson, is to engage and get social. Blog effectively, tweet, retweet, create and post video on Youtube. Solicit comments from your followers on your blog, on Youtube, on Facebook, on Twitter… and everywhere else. It’s important to engage, and be nice, and be genuinely interested in your customers and target audience. More important now that it’s ever been.

This emphasis of Google on interactions on social network forces us business folk to get down with the common peeps, our customers. What a great world it will be if the customers and business understood each other better and didn’t simply view each other as a means to an end. Well, that’s sort of what is happening with the evolution of social media, isn’t it? The gap between business and customer is being bridged.

To all those who view companies as ‘heartless corporations’, they learn through interaction on the social networks that the companies actually are comprised of people just like them, who respond to their questions and seek out their opinions? The owners and managers out there who might view the buying public as fickle, just out for themselves in search of the next bargain, learn more about their customers, are better able to serve them and to develop loyal customers.